China plans to build a powerful computer grid connecting 100 leading universities in China by the year 2005 on the China Education and Research Network, the Beijing- based English-language newspaper "China Daily" reported on Thursday.

Describing the planned computer grid as the largest high- performance one in the world, the newspaper said the grid, which works like a power grid, enables computing resources distributed over a vast area to share resources and work collaboratively and, therefore, is one of the most advanced computing technologies.

The grid will be built by the Ministry of Education in cooperation with semiconductor giant Intel, and representatives of the Chinese ministry and Intel signed a memorandum of understanding on the project Wednesday, according to the newspaper.

The grid is expected to have a peak-computing speed of more than 20,000 giga-floating point operations per second and a storage capacity of over 500 terabytes, exceeding the size of the world's biggest present grid in the United States.

Wee Theng Tan, president of Intel China, said his company is extremely committed to this project.

The 12 universities involved in the first phase of the project will each get two supercomputers equipped with Intel's Intanium 2 processors.

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